Wine Developers Are Creating Their Own Vulkan Loader Library

While mainline Wine development code has enough Vulkan support that it can run the few Windows Vulkan games like Wolfenstein and DOOM along with the Vulkan code samples and the Vulkan information utility, it's currently dependent upon the Windows Vulkan SDK being manually installed on the system. That's now changing with Wine developers working on their own Vulkan loader library.

Roderick Colenbrander continues leading the work on Wine's Vulkan support and today published his own vulkan-1 implementation. The approach he's going with for handling the Vulkan loader on Wine is writing his own simplistic loader for the time being that can be easily redistributed as part of Wine itself. Those wanting the more featureful default Vulkan loader that is part of the LunarG Vulkan SDK can continue to download and install it yourself.

This loader library is needed for loading the Vulkan ICD "driver" code written for Wine that in turn interfaces with the host system's Vulkan support. This vulkan-1.dll loader written by Roderick is just about one thousand lines of code as he skipped support for some non-basic features like not supporting multiple installable client drivers (ICDs) and also not supporting Vulkan layers. If you want any extra functionality for now you will need to install the LunarG SDK.

With this simple Vulkan library it is enough now to handle Wolfenstein as well as the Vulkan cube demo and vulkaninfo among other possible Windows Vulkan programs.

The patches can now be tried for testing. If all goes well perhaps we will see this for Friday's Wine 3.5 release so that Vulkan can be working out-of-the-box on Wine.